Netflix Gets Kinect Support and it’s Pretty Garbage

Microsoft revealed today that it added Kinect support to the popular Netflix service for Xbox 360. Apparently, fans of Kinect and Netflix have been waiting for this functionality for some time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that this feature works very well. Users can pause and play films, but only if they appear as “one of the recommended [Netflix] titles” from the Kinect central hub.

This also means the user won’t get to choose from their entire library, only these recommendations. Once all of these have been chosen, the user will be prompted to use their controller to select and play other content, effectively ending the motion based functionality of Kinect. This begs the question, if the Kinect integration is this limited and dysfunctional, then why use it at all?

A ton of people bought Kinects, but I can only hope that they didn’t buy them for use with Netflix because at this point it wouldn’t look like a very wise purchase. By the way MS, the secret to making people want Kinect probably isn’t rushing out sloppy applications for features that already work fine without the device. Back to the drawing board with you.